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Nice guide. I may have to break down and buy a CF card now.
I am wondering if anyone is willing to run a prefetch experiment with their fast CF card? I've been playing around with the prefetch settings and I've found that boot times can be as fast as 10 seconds to explorer launch and 11 seconds to booting complete if you enable prefetching and let windows do it's "optimizations". More on the optimization part in a moment.
Here's how it would work. Create your Minlogon+EWF system however leave prefetching on
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters]
"EnablePrefetcher"=dword:00000003
Make sure the COM+ Event System and Task Scheduler services are set to automatic.
Once you have your system and services set how you want them, delete the contents, if any, of C:\WINDOWS\Prefetch and then reboot.
Windows will generate the file "NTOSBOOT-B00DFAAD.pf" This is the prefetch info for your boot process. Each time you reboot the file is updated however the updates are not immediate. It can take a couple of minutes after booting before windows will write/update this file. Reboot your system 3-5 times and wait each time for the NTOSBOOT-B00DFAAD.pf file to be updated (check the time stamp the file size may not change). While you are waiting for the boot prefetch file to update launch and close all the applications that you would expect to use on your system, doing so will generate the prefetch files for those applications update those prefetch files 3-5 times as well. It is important that you do not change anything about your boot process (services or startup programs) while generating the boot prefetch file. You may want to run bootvis at each reboot to track how the boot times are changing with each cycle.
Once you're done you should have several files in the prefetch directory (one for each application you've launched + the boot prefetch file. The boot prefetch file should be around 190-240kb if it is any larger something isn't quite right. It's not that things won't work , your boot times will just be a second or two longer. The smaller this file the faster your boot will be... or at least that has been my observation.
At this point you're ready to for lack of a better word freeze your prefetch configuration. Activate EWF so your drive is protected from writes but leave prefetching on. My understanding is that any writes to the prefetch folder will be written to ram and erased on reboot which is fine. The size of individual prefetch files is quite small so I don't think you will be wasting much memory. On my system which was running for about a week my prefetch folder was about 2MB in size. Alternatively there is a registry setting that specifies the location of the prefetch folder, you could try changing this but I haven't tried it out. Another possibility is to disable either the task scheduler service or the COM+ Event System service. Prefetching needs these services active to write prefetch files. Transfer your image to your CF card and test it out.
Just to give you an idea of the kind of improvement that can be had here are some numbers...
EpiaM10kN
512meg ram no pagefile
2.5 5400rpm seagate 40gig drive
Dlink dwl122 usb (DISABLED in CONTROLPANEL, enabling adds 1-2 seconds to the boot time)
Services running: Windows Audio, CAD TRAP, DHCP CLIENT, COM+ Event System,Event Log, Plug and Play, Protected Storage, Security Accounts Manager, Task Scheduler, Wireless Zero, Logical Disk Manager, Workstation, Windows Management Instrumentation.
Prefetching on: Explorer launch 9.77 sec, boot complete 10.91 sec
Prefetching off: Explorer launch 12.35 sec, boot complete 17.72
On the optimizations... The prefetch system will eventually write a file called Layout.ini in your prefetch directory. I'm not sure after what time interval the file is written, I left my system on overnight and in the morning the file was there. Apparently windows uses this file for further optimizations. Another interesting point was that two new prefetch files were in my prefetch directory "DefragNTFS.exe-xxxxx.pf, Defrag.exe-xxxxx.pf" from what I've read online these are the programs that defrag and optimize the layout of the boot files... One final piece of information I was playing with the bootvis optimize function and for grins killed the program while it was "optimizing" my system... After I rebooted my system the boot prefetch file was gone... Looks like part of bootvis's optimization routine deals with prefetch files.
Ok, enough for now. Let us know how it works.
-momanz
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